Gartner:
CFOs Eye Process Mining For RPA
April
28, 2022
CFOs
Seek More Value from RPA Amid Growing Portfolio of Technologies to Achieve
Efficiency
Eighty
percent of finance leaders agree finance must significantly accelerate its
implementation of digital technology, such as robotic process automation (RPA)
and artificial intelligence to effectively support the business by 2025,
according to a survey by Gartner, Inc. When implementing RPA, CFOs see
investment in process mining as key to unlocking returns from the technology.
A December 2021 survey of 400 finance leaders showed a broad expansion of the
CFO technology toolkit being used to drive efficiency, agility and productivity.
RPA remains the technology most often cited by respondents in supporting their
hyper-automation objectives (see Figure 1), but the technology has yet to
deliver a high level of value to finance departments.
“Despite ongoing investment in RPA, CFOs are realizing they need a broader
toolkit to realize their full automation objectives,” said Nisha Bhandare, VP
analyst in the Gartner Finance practice. “To realize higher value from their RPA
investments, CFOs are turning to a suite of complementary efficiency
technologies, such as process mining, which will remain a future driver of
growth for RPA in the coming years.”
Figure 1: Percentage of Respondents Associating Technology with Specific
Primary Value Factors
As part
of the survey, CFOs were questioned on 16 different technologies within the
category of process automation and optimization. Only three technologies within
the category are expected to see an increase in investments from current levels
over the next two years: reporting automation, RPA and process mining. Of those
three technologies, only reporting automation was rated as currently delivering
“high value” to finance departments.
“Finance processes are complex, exception-heavy and reliant on judgment and
subject matter expertise,” said Bhandare. “This currently puts a ceiling on
RPA’s value creation, and CFOs need to explore additional options both to
enhance RPA’s usefulness, and in some cases, select better fit technologies for
their automation goals.”
Process Mining Attracts Greater Investment
Gartner’s analysis of the survey results indicates three key drivers of growth
for RPA over the coming two years: embedded machine learning, cloud delivery and
integration with process mining. While process mining is still an exploratory
technology, not yet being widely adopted by finance departments, the potential
to enhance current RPA implementation makes it an attractive technology within
the category.
Process
mining is designed to discover, monitor, and improve real processes by analyzing
event logs in information systems. Finance leaders can review exactly what
happened during the execution of their process after the event logs are analyzed
by the process mining algorithm. Process mining can be used in three distinct
and additive ways, including:
Process discovery – Build a model to reveal how a current process is
operating “as is”
Process conformance – Compare the actual event’s process to its ideal model
Process enhancement – Improve or extend processes, including with RPA
“Process
mining gives finance leaders a tool to identify the root causes of
inefficiencies and exceptions in real-time,” said Bhandare. “This provides the
opportunity to streamline and correct processes that may have been perceived to
be resistant to automation and introduce more opportunities to use RPA—and
automation more broadly—in achieving additional efficiency and cost gains.”
